Abstract: The Victorian age haunted post-war Britain in different ways. It was there in the physical remains of homelessness and poverty and in the taste for nineteenth-century bric-a-brac. Most powerfully, it was there in the shadows and aesthetics of post-war British film. Drawing on a wide range of art and culture this lecture looks at the meaning of the Victorian to post-war Britain and its impact on the project of modernity and reconstruction.

Speaker Bio: Lynda Nead is Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, and she will be visiting Caltech during the spring term of 2017 as a Moore Distinguished Scholar. She has published widely on the history of British visual culture and her forthcoming book The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain will be published by Yale University Press in September 2017.